“You’ve got to be kidding!” said George. “Aunt Elodie—locked up?”
Uncle Henri looked at them from under his fearsome eyebrows and shook his bare head. He didn’t look as if he were joking.
• • •
As soon as George, Thomas, and Augustin had given their report to General Maistre and received the reply, Uncle Henri pulled them outside the command post. Their delight at seeing him was short-lived.
“Nice to see you, too, boys. Now be quiet and listen.”
It was one shock after another, Aunt Elodie’s detention being but one. There’d been arrests and imprisonment, judges removed, property confiscated.
Henri conceded that much of the news out of Alorainn was rumor, at best second- or third-hand. But the talk was all the same: a perpetual state of martial law. The royal guard transformed into the duchess’s private army. There’d even been whispering about hangings.
Now the lads understood why news from home had grown so infrequent and short on specifics. It wasn’t simply the war and lost letters.
The one constant in all the accounts was Duchess Johanna. No longer encumbered by the stronger members of the family, she had remade Alorainn in her image.
“It was admirable,” said Henri, “that we all went off to do our duty, but we were fools to leave Alorainn in the hands of this madwoman. I’m as much to blame as anyone, ignoring warnings, postponing visits.”
“We haven’t been back in . . .” George looked at the others. “Well, I haven’t been back at all. Not once. Thomas was there briefly, but not in—”
“Almost sixteen months,” Thomas said.
“I told you you couldn’t trust that daft woman,” said Augustin.
“Not what you were saying this morning,” said George.
“Well—I never said she wasn’t attractive.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes,” said Henri.
“I’m just saying”—Augustin tugged at his bandage—“she was broken to start with, but after Halick disappeared, she’s gone over the moon.”
“Augustin!” said Uncle Henri, noticing the young man’s arm. “You’re wounded.”
“We’re on our way to the infirmary,” said George.
“It’s nothing,” said Augustin. “Just need to change this dressing. I can do it myself.”
“He’s afraid of the flu,” said Thomas.
“He should be,” said Uncle Henri. “We’ve been lucky here so far, but the thing is spreading like wildfire.”
“See, I told you,” said Augustin.
They passed through a makeshift mess area, tables set up outdoors to take advantage of the sun. Soldiers, medical staff, and wounded, eyes glazed in fatigue, were beginning to straggle in. Augustin looked down at the trays and shook his head in disgust.
“One of the infirmaries,” said Henri, “just there.” He pointed across to a piece of wall, held up by a briar rose. “Next to that. Down in the basement. I’ll meet you there with your furlough orders.” He started away. “Oh! And don’t leave without your mail. I’m tired of carrying it around.”
He stopped again. “Listen. I know you’ve got to report back to Foch. But when you’re done—get home, hear? Quick as you can. But be careful.”
• • •
The soldier’s head was wrapped in bandages, cotton pads over both his eyes. Coal held the young man’s arm, helping him across the patch of rough ground.
“Right,” said Coal. “But isn’t the—doesn’t the mustard gas pool up in the bottom of the craters?”
“Yes, Father, sometimes, when it’s cold.”
Coal was dressed in an army chaplain’s uniform, white clerical collar, a silver cross on his lapel.
“So, you think,” said Coal, “that God is punishing you for—?”
“Because I’m a coward, Father. If I hadn’t hid in a hole. If I’d kept going with my mates, I wouldn’t have—I wouldn’t be like this.”
“Here, sit.” Coal sat the lad down on a crate in the warm sunlight. Dragging over another box, he winced as he took a seat next to the boy. From that vantage point, he could see most of the camp. He patted his pockets for his spectacles. Lately, he could hardly go out in daylight hours without tinted lenses. He’d taken these off an engineer in the wreck of a troop train near the Italian border the previous year.
“So, instead of being blind, you’d be dead like your friends?”
The boy fumbled trying to get a cigarette from the pack. Maybe he was crying. It was hard to tell, the lad’s eyes bandaged as they were.
“Give it to me.”
Coal tapped a cigarette out the pack, pulled the petrol lighter from his pocket, and lit it. He took a drag and stuck it between the soldier’s lips.
“Do you know,” said Coal, “why Moses wasn’t allowed into the Promised Land? After forty years in the desert?”
“No, Father. Why?”
“No, I’m asking you,” said Coal. “I’ve read it a hundred times and it still doesn’t make any sense. God tells him, Moses, to strike the rock with his staff, once, to get water. Moses hits it twice. God gets angry at him.”
“But I don’t—what’s that got to do with . . . ?”
Coal looked past the soldier and saw Adi and the old man coming up out of the mess, trays in hand.
“I don’t know. Just that I don’t think it pays to lean too much on this whole ‘God’s will’ thing.”
“Father?” said the young man, confused.
“You can’t say He picks favorites, though, can you? Even if you’re Moses.
“What amazes me,” said Coal, rolling his shoulder, trying in vain to ease the ache, “is that in the face of all this you can still ask these questions. Whether you’re a good man, whether you’ve done the best you can? How bad would things have to be, before you wouldn’t ask these questions, I mean?”
Coal watched as the girl sat herself on a bench, the doctor next to her. She pushed her food around on her tray and stared into space.
“I don’t know, Father. Can it get any worse than this?”
“In Hell, maybe.” Coal took one of the lad’s cigarettes for himself and returned the pack to the boy’s pocket.
“I guess that’s all Hell is, really. Just the place where no one asks questions anymore.”
• • •
Coal sat smoking on his wooden ammo box, leaning to the side occasionally to keep out of the girl’s line of sight. He hardly need bother. She wasn’t noticing much of anything these days.
Under his breath he cursed. It was inconceivable. The girl—still here, still playing this imbecilic game. Would she not concede, even now? Less than a week. What chance did she have? Wincing, he dug his thumb into his shoulder.
For a time, the wound had appeared to be, if not improving, at least not getting worse. But in the last few months it had festered again, seeping through bandages, ruining his clothes. He could hardly use his right arm anymore. And he was sure that the gash was giving off a foul odor.
It had taken him much too long to recognize the bind he was in. Until the game was done, he couldn’t take the watch back. But without the watch, he would . . . ? Well, he was not exactly sure what. He had become convinced of one thing, however: the seconds ticking away were not just the boys’, but his as well.
He fiddled with a ring, too small to push past the first knuckle on his little finger. He’d taken it a couple of weeks before from the hand of a girl buried in the rubble of a bombed-out building in Tolmezzo, in northern Italy.
He couldn’t identify the stone, couldn’t see the color. Another result, he was certain, of being so long separated from his watch. In fits and starts, all his senses had grown dull. It was a wonder he could even walk. And the headaches and the—
“For Christ’s sakes,” he said out loud. “Stop your whining and do something.”
The young man sat up, as if he’d been slapped. “But—I—I—” he stuttered.
“No. I don’t mean you,” said Coal.
“But—you’re right, Father. I’m just feeling sorry for myself. There are men with no arms. No faces.”
Coal looked over to see the girl and the old man getting up from their bench. They dropped their trays off and started back.
Coal got to his feet as well. He dropped his cigarette into the mud and pushed at it with the toe of his boot. Taking hold of the young soldier’s arm, he pulled him up.
“Come on boy. Can’t sit around here all day. There’s work to be done.”
• • •
Doc and Adi made their way back to the infirmary; there was only so long they could stand seeing soldiers eating Maconochie and milk biscuit sludge.
As she and Doc came down the steps into the infirmary, Thomas was the first one she saw. He was steadying another soldier who was in the process of having the wound on his arm irrigated. They’d heard the man cursing half a block away.
The same instant that she saw Thomas, she heard:
“God sakes, Augustin. Keep this up and you’re going to wake the Germans.”
“They’re eighty kilometers away,” said Augustin.
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”
It was George—his hair cut shorter, his face leaner, but looking splendid in uniform.
He turned and looked right at Adi.
But with the morning sun streaming into the basement all he could see were two silhouetted figures coming down the steps.
Adi stood frozen, the weight of years and the strain of impending failure rendering her brain nearly unable to grasp what was before her eyes.
Doc said to the intern cleaning Augustin’s wound, “You can’t just bandage that! Goux. Show him how to stitch this up.”
Before she knew it, Adi was up the stairs and running. Pushing past soldiers, she ran through the tents and fled down into the communications trenches, into what used to be the trenches of the front lines.
Gasping for breath she collapsed onto the firing shelf. A big brown rat grudgingly moved aside, scuttling back into a space between the sandbags. It watched as Adi stood up, sat down, and stood again and then proceeded, her fists clenched, to stomp circles in the mud.
• • •
By the time she got her nerve up to go back, they were gone. As she slunk down the stairs, she gestured to Doc, something about the food making her sick.
Doc wasn’t buying it, but he let it pass.
When she found out later that afternoon that George and Thomas and the other man had left the camp, she teetered between disappointment and relief, which only took a moment to turn to despair. It gathered over her like a small dark planet.
It was just her bad luck that there were no Germans across no-man’s-land to put her out of her misery. Though she knew she was too much of a coward for that.
She opted instead for a bombed-out house down the road away from the river. She dropped down at the bottom of a ruined staircase, put her fists to her face, and cried till the stars came out.